Tenant farmers hoe a Eutaw, Alabama cotton field in 1936. (Library of Congress)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Ken Burns, America's foremost documentarian, has taken on many subjects, from the Civil War, to baseball, to jazz. Most recently, Burns trained his camera on the Dirty Thirties, on the dust-covered Okies, and on the Great Plains region. The result was "The Dust Bowl," a two-part, four-hour-long series that aired on PBS Sunday and Monday.

The documentary highlighted the struggles of farmers in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and the Texas panhandle in the 1930s who watched as the soil they worked and tilled dried up and rejected them, and blew away, along with their homesteading dreams, in huge "black blizzards" carried by the prevailing winds.

Alabama is not a Plains state. It was not a part of the Dust Bowl. But the South saw similar agricultural problems, and a crisis that some say was on a similar level to the Dust Bowl in the west.

"A lot of the current agricultural policies that we have today come out of the Dust Bowl, (including) soil conservation efforts and the system of government subsidies that we still pay for agricultural producers," said Charles Roberts, a Birmingham native who earned his doctorate in history from the University of Alabama this year, and wrote his dissertation on rural poverty, the Great Depression, and the New Deal.

According to Dr. Robert J. Norrell, a professor of American history at the University of Tennessee, Alabama was experiencing a "similar phenomenon" to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, a catastrophe that was part economic, and part ecological.

"There is a lot of migration precipitated by economic and ecological disaster, just as there was in the Dust Bowl in the Southwest," Norrell said when reached by phone last week.

There were several agricultural and economic problems that led to a catastrophe in the South, all of them revolving around "King Cotton."

For one, Roberts said farmers in Alabama were not tied to the land they worked.

"People don't own the land that they're working on, so they don't really have any reason to invest in it, to make sure there's not problems of erosion, and things like that," Roberts said. By one estimate, almost three quarters of the cotton farms in Alabama in the 1930s were worked by tenants.

As in the Great Plains states, Alabama farmers were not caring for the soil, and they were farming (and overfarming) cotton wherever they could.

"Cotton is an extraordinarily hard crop, ecologically," Norrell said.

"The South gets a lot more rain" than the Dust Bowl states, Roberts said. "So, in the South, the problem is really more one of erosion and the soil losing its productivity."

That erosion and exhaustion made the land "useless," according to Norrell.

Homestead communities like this one encouraged subsidence farming, in the hope that low-intensity farming would allow a farmer the flexibility to hold a part-time job. (Library of Congress)

On top of the soil issues, economic problems loomed. In Sept. 1931, the price of cotton dropped to a record low of five cents a pound. "Five cents a pound is way, way below the break-even point for cotton," Norrell said.

"There's just way too many people in the South involved in agriculture. There's just way too many people trying to farm. It was okay, for a while, when the price of cotton was good. But when it tanked in the 1930s, I mean, people were starving to death."

And yet Alabamians kept making cotton. Because, as Norrell said, it "was really the only cash crop that people knew."

"What you have is a lot of folks who had -- say, in the late 1920s -- been able to make a living on the cotton farms in Alabama in the Great Depression, they can't anymore," Norrell said.

Many of the farmers packed up and headed for the cities. But there were few jobs there, at least until war production ramped up in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

"As bad as conditions are agriculturally (in the 1930s), conditions in the cities are even worse," Roberts said.

The federal government issued a number of responses to these problems. For the soil erosion in Dust Bowl states and in the South, one answer was the Soil Conservation Service (now the National Resources Conservation Service), which was formed in 1933. The agency encouraged good farming practices, which would preserve and maintain quality soil.

Other programs paid farmers not to grow certain crops, or to plow under portions of their crops.

The federal government also protected large swaths of land, making them into national forests and taking them out of agricultural production. The Talladega National Forest and Conecuh National Forest were both established in 1936. They now consist of nearly 500,000 acres, combined.

Meanwhile, the Subsistence Homesteads Division encouraged farmers who had moved to cities seeking work to move into small, planned homestead communities based on subsistence farming. The idea behind the program was that subsistence farming would allow the relocated families to work part time at another job.

The SHD, a New Deal program started in 1933, left Alabama with several communities, including Bankhead Farms in Jasper, Greenwood homesteads near Bessemer, Gardendale homesteads near Birmingham, Palmerdale Homesteads near Pinson, and the Cahaba community near Trussville.

"The conditions in the South (during the Dust Bowl) are just as bad as they are out west" during the 1930s, Roberts said in a phone conversation. "They're just not quite as visible."